1.07.2007

reading the books & awash in difficulty resuming writing after all then FAMILY has departed, mostly due to my problematic current project, THE QUILTS and the SILHOUETTES (they end up being about slavery (in black and white, but often in color elsewhere, a craft by both black and white women, but it is the poor black women's quilts which are "outsider art" and the white middle class women's which are "high textile craft" -- the source material for the first batch -- a simple nine square -- was two novels, one written by a southern woman and one written by a northern woman, ante-bellum romances), and what do I have to say about slavery and race relations? very little, I fear)

the silhouettes are silhouettes drawn on profiles of sports figures from the back of an old sports almanac -- I dedicated them to Kara Walker, because I did use some of hers (I also used others, from the timeperiod this book covers -- the late 19th century) -- but my concern is that of course the athletes profiled *aren't* all black, and the assumption I think is they are, and the racist assumption is *of course they are* african-americans, athletes, Walker, especially after THE QUILTS

an added concern is that the silhouette poems themselves aren't rich as I'd hoped -- they need an additional aspect to be really much better (they are about temporary fame, records / recording, measuring human successes, shadowy pursuits)

the quilts aren't really poems yet -- I think the collages (the piecing of the quilt) is very interesting, but then I realized that that is just piecing, and not quilting; I realized I must choose words to emphasize to "stitch them down" to quilt them; this isn't as hard as is thought but changes completely -- I think the easiest thing to do for print might be to do it backwards -- bold some words, then piece, because while I can get the words in bold aligned on top of the scan of the collage including the word, the spacing shifts

even still, in a few e-mails to Jessica about her publication (sounds like the original poets & potes) of four 4 x 4 poems, what is the poem? I had been playing then with using the words in a poem as a constraint, but THIS IS WHERE THE POEMS ARE ABOUT SLAVERY -- I can only expect the same fromthe Log Cabin quilt which is surely about Abraham Lincoln as the patterns are log cabin, courthouse steps, furrows...

so, I am casting about for something completely different to read, should I go back to MAXIMUS? I picked up Marginalien by Alan Halsey and boy does Thomas Pynchon's song and poesie (I am also reading Against the Day -- only three typos found thus far, in addition to the HUGE ERROR on the jacket conflating the WORLD'S FAIR with the COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION) resemble Halsey's. Picked up IOVIS vol 1 -- can't find vol. 2; since vol. 2 was a partial inspiration for my big project it seems to be sorted somewhere else -- have I mentioned we had company for several weeks? -- and the Marjorie Perloff book with new in scare quotes -- the "new" modernism -- now, if that's not postmodern, WHAT IS?